Tom Lane writes:
> Gimme a break, guys. There *was* discussion, eg here,
> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2003-06/msg01092.php
> and the patch was posted for review, see this thread:
> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-patches/2003-06/msg00420.php
I confused this with the private mails that we exchanged. Sorry.
> The point was to allow a GUI utility to be built that would help in
> editing postgresql.conf. It couldn't assume the postmaster is already
> running, so just extending the pg_config view wouldn't answer, and
> duplicating knowledge of all the GUC variables in a separate tool
> would have created maintenance headaches.
OK, but does this tool actually need all of the following features:
-G -- do not group by category
both -m and -M -- machine-readable output with and without header
human-readable output
Were some of these just added for "completeness"? With what rationale?
Also, --help-config 'foo' outputs all parameters matching 'foo' somewhere
in the string, not only 'foo'. I think that is a misdesign.
> I would like to think that
> the patch would eventually allow us to generate postgresql.conf.sample
> automatically from the guc.c tables, and thereby reduce the number of
> files to maintain, but that didn't get done yet. The reason for having
> both "long" and "short" descriptions of the variables was that I foresaw
> the "short" versions as becoming the per-line comments in
> postgresql.conf. The "long" descriptions were what the GUI tool wants.
Most parameters don't have long descriptions, so that doesn't seem right.
Also, in many cases where there is a long description, it was copied out
of the documentation, with the short description being the first sentence
and the long description being the rest. The result is that in some cases
the long description doesn't make sense in isolation. I would like that
to be clarified.
--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e@gmx.net